A United By Blue volunteer gathers waste towards the company’s goal of extracting 250,ooolb of garbage from waterways. The small Philadelphia company has focused on direct action campaigns instead of donation-based activism
Photograph: Courtesy of United By Blue

On a late Saturday morning earlier this month, hundreds of people gathered under a navy blue tent at Brandywine Creek in Wilmington, Delaware, in preparation to pick up trash. Philadelphia-based outdoor lifestyle company United By Blue has been organizing these waterway cleanups since the company was founded in 2010, but this day was a bit different. It marked the company’s 140th cleanup, on target to collect 250,000lb of waste from beaches and waterways.

In 2007, United By Blue founder Brian Linton started Sand Shack, a company that sold resort jewelry, and donated some of the revenue to nonprofits focused on ocean and waterway conservation.

“When I started the business in college, I figured the way to do good in business is to give money away,” Linton said. “And that was the natural thought process of a 20-year-old. And the reality over the course of three years became that, it’s a good model for bigger businesses – and it’s a noble thing for anybody to do – but to me, it didn’t really have any tangible impact.”

When Linton founded United By Blue, he decided to be the one contributing to the conservation efforts, and not with money, but with the company’s own manpower. The plan was to pick up a pound of trash for every product. And now, at about 220,000 products sold, United By Blue has more than stuck to its promise.

The company joins the ranks of other outdoor companies trying to give back to the environment. In 2012, on Black Friday, one of the largest companies in the outdoor lifestyle industry, Patagonia, asked their customers to stop buying things they don’t need in their “Common Threads” campaign. Instead, the company urged people to repair and recycle their clothes, to cut down on waste and the resources necessary to produce a new jacket. Groups like the Sustainable Apparel Coalition and the Outdoor Industry Association’s Sustainability Working Group have created indexes to push for more responsible action.

All this effort could have a big impact. The Outdoor Industry Association estimates about 60% of American adults classify themselves as outdoor consumers, and each spends about $137 annually on outdoor apparel.

United By Blue got its start selling graphic T-shirts, and expanded to a full line of apparel for men and women with pants, dresses and socks. They also sell items like artisan paddles and hand-painted axes, which blur the line between art and function. They also stock brands – like Red Wing boots – the company has deemed to further their own message of sustainably produced goods. They sell their products online and in national retail stores like Urban Outfitters, Nordstrom, and REI, as well as various local outdoor retailers and, as of 2013, in their own coffee shop-retail hybrid stores.

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The first hybrid store is located in the ground floor of United By Blue’s headquarters, on a quiet street in the historic neighborhood of Old City, Philadelphia. The business office is on the second floor, with a photo studio and conference room on the third. Linton calls it a “vertical business”. The company has another shop in University City, which Linton said is smaller but busier. This summer, the company also opened a pop-up shop in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Between the two shops, the company employs 24 people, with 13 on the operations side.

The small shops also serve as a community space – tables and desks are handmade from reclaimed wood, and the light fixtures in United By Blue’s University City store are made from recycled industrial whisks from a Tastykake factory. This is emblematic of another particular obsession in the company – creating “responsible, durable goods”. And for apparel, that starts with materials.

“In the entire line, we only have a handful of fibers that we use,” Linton said. “A lot of the synthetics are what fast fashion uses. So we have a lot of cotton, wool, bison, recycled polyester, tencel – those are our main materials in the line.“

About that bison: last November, the company started a Kickstarter campaign for a $38 pair of socks. It sounds ridiculous, but the team dubbed it the “Ultimate American Sock”, because it was made from the downy part of a bison’s coat.

“There’s a growing meat industry for the bison in the US, and unfortunately a lot of that fiber is discarded,” Linton said. “So there was this ‘aha!’ moment where the bison fiber is actually a technical, warm fiber, and it’s not being used to its full advantage or its full potential. So I got my hands on some. I bought 30lb of it to start playing around with it.”

Despite the high price tag, Linton’s company has sold more than 10,000 pairs of the socks so far, with demand that far surpasses the supply chain. This fall, they’re expanding to a jacket made with the coarser outer layer of bison fur.

However, there are some sustainability hurdles United By Blue has yet to clear – like plastic.

“We are very focused on picking up plastics out of the ocean, but in doing business in this industry, many factories love to put plastic around anything,” Linton said.

A couple years ago, United By Blue tried wrapping their garments in paper bags instead of plastic. But straying from the norm confused retailers, who worried the products would get damaged without a protective plastic covering. “So we’re reevaluating how do we reduce and ultimately remove plastic from the supply chain, and how do we do that responsibly while not losing sales, because at the end of the day, the business is a business,” Linton said.

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The company’s commitment to sustainability has earned United By Blue a B Corporation certification. B Lab, the nonprofit that gives out the certificate, likens it to LEED certification for green buildings.

The most visible part of that commitment is the waterway cleanups. Since 2010, the company has prompted more than 4,500 volunteers to get out and clear trash from beaches and coasts in 24 US states, as well as Canada.

To mobilize all those volunteers, the company partners with companies like Subaru, and organizations like the National Park Service and the Nature Conservancy, as well as local outdoor retailers. All had representatives on hand at Brandywine Creek in Delaware at the big September cleanup. As the day tipped toward afternoon, volunteers trekked back to the tent to weigh their catch, telling stories of a near bee attack, or towing a waterlogged inner tube.

The line to weigh the trash snaked its way through the park. Kids and their parents, groups of teens and couples of all ages showed up to collect, showing off the weirdest items found, like a collection of shoes or old knives and hubcaps. The strangest item (a collection of various shoes) won a prize, as did the lucky volunteer who had the closest guess at the total weight of the day’s haul.

By the end of the cleanup, the group had far surpassed the 400lb needed to reach the 250,000lb goal, gathering more than 1,800lb in total. pounds.

To celebrate, the United By Blue team stopped for lunch at a nearby pizza place to celebrate, and lamented that their food was served on styrofoam.